Despite the difficulties of the past
Tulbach Brown’s piece in the Daily Thresh was well up to standard. It covered a full half-page; but it was chopped up into those short, bite-sized sticks of prose which, like sugar-coated cornflakes, the Daily Thresh’s readers found easiest to digest. It was, all knowing hands agreed, well worth TB’s having missed his deadline.
PORT VICTORIA, PHARAMAUL. (Delayed.)
‘Delayed’ is a polite way of saying that Pharamaul, the latest of our emerging paradises, is not yet geared to a working newsman’s schedule. ‘Come back tomorrow’ might be the local motto. But no matter. Time in this sluggish part of the world is never vital.
Pharamaul – so say the experts on the spot – will not go away. Not for a couple of years, anyway.
I witnessed today yet another in the interminable series of ‘Independence Days’, celebrating the ‘end of slavery’ for some and ‘kowtowing to the niggers’ for others, when a new country sets out on the highroad to freedom, with a golden handshake from the British taxpayer.
This time it was Pharamaul; and if you are not entirely sure where – or even what – Pharamaul is, then you may join the club.
In fact it is a half-asleep island off the west coast of southern Africa. It is small, it is hot; it grows gaunt cattle and catches small fish. It has 200,000 inhabitants, which makes it about the size of Plymouth or Harrow.
As from today, this African Plymouth/Harrow is an independent country; and if you suspect that it might not be a viable one – the current jargon for being able to stand on its own two feet without resort to the begging bowl – then you may, once again, join the club.
But who are the people who will be trying to make a go of it? Whom do we leave behind, with the white man’s burden and the best of British luck?
At the top, for the moment, is the Governor-General, the Earl of Urle. I say ‘for the moment’, because these ungrateful countries have a habit of kicking out the Queen’s representative at the first opportunity, and electing their own president instead.
But for the moment, the Earl it is; the Labour peer whose last speech in the House of Lords besought us to ‘give homosexuals a fair deal’. His speech at the Independence Day ceremony was on a loftier plane. It besought the good citizens of Pharamaul to ‘march forward together towards a happy and prosperous future’.
Judging by his Lordship’s reception, the good citizens would much prefer to stay right where they are, squatting on their hunkers and waiting for that happy future to drop into their laps.
The noble lord will be assisted in his labours by the Countess of Urle, whom he married in a Mexican ceremony last year. She is better known to the swinging world as Bobo Tempest, high priestess of the Rhyming Rudery, whose very personal ‘O Come! All Ye Faithful’ sent clerics into a tizzy, and several other great and good friends scurrying for more cover than they seem to have enjoyed in the past.
There was no doubt at all about her reception. Except for a handful of stuffy old-timers, who still thought that, at an official viceregal ceremony, Her Excellency’s skirts should at least reach the knee, the good citizens, black and white, thought she was a dish.
Next on our list of assorted top people is the man of the moment, Pharamaul’s first Prime Minister, Dinamaula. Pharamaul loves him dearly; it may be that the British Government loves him a bit less dearly, since in 1956 they exiled him for five years for general misbehaviour, and only allowed him back to his native land seven years ago.
However, tastes change, governments switch their options, and all is now forgiven. Dinamaula is now at the top of the heap, with official blessings and best wishes. Since he did not afford me the courtesy of an interview, I am unable to report how his improved fortunes have affected him.
However, he looked happy enough, as well he might. He now has power, money in the bank, and a free hand.
Last on this list is the British-appointed Chief Secretary, Mr David Bracken, CMG, MC. I first met Mr Bracken twelve years ago, when he was a junior member of the Governor’s staff in Port Victoria. Time, as they say, flies. But junior or not, he had some very senior ideas, even then.
He didn’t like the Press, and one must admit that the Press didn’t like him. It was his appointed task to persuade us that Dinamaula deserved his exile; and when we tried to probe a little deeper – such as asking ‘Why?’ – Mr Bracken’s reaction was dramatic, not to say hysterical.
It was all our fault, he told us, for ‘stirring up trouble’. Without the Press to poison it, Pharamaul would have been paradise itself.
Since, when I tried to talk to him today, he was curt to the point of rudeness, it is safe to say that he still feels the same way.
However, it was a hot day; and a sword, a high tight collar, and a helmet adorned with cock’s feathers is not exactly the gear guaranteed to improve the disposition.
Back in 1956, it was no coincidence that Mr Bracken was chosen as the ‘conducting officer’ to accompany Dinamaula on his flight into exile – ie to see him safely off the premises. He had been the official hatchet boy from the start. Now Mr B is staying on, as the head of Pharamaul’s civil-service machine.
It is a curious choice; and not the least curious part of it is Dinamaula’s agreement. One would have thought there would still be plenty of bad blood between them. However, neither of them could or would enlighten me on this point. Nor, indeed, on any other.
I was left to enjoy the delirious pleasures of a Government House garden party, a stuffed relic of the Victorian era, which was a depressing kick-off for Pharamaul’s coming-of-age.
I had more luck later on in the plush mausoleum known as the Port Victoria Club. There, they at least had the guts to speak their minds, even if some of those minds seemed nearer, in size and scope, to pickled walnuts than human brains.
I heard stern talk of putting the Negro members of the legislature up against a wall and shooting them. True, this does happen in other parts of Africa, but it was odd to hear it from a white elected representative, Mr Terence Woodcock, OBE, known to his friends as ‘Splinter’.
Mr Woodcock was in no doubt about Pharamaul’s future. The country, he prophesied, would be broke within two years.
Would he be standing for re-election to the legislature? ‘If they don’t elect me,’ said Mr Woodcock, ‘that’s their bad luck. They’ll finish up with a hundred-per-cent black zoo.’
Worse still, in his view, there were going to be black club members, right here on the premises. Horrors! The whisky flowed like water as the company contemplated this frightful prospect.
As I left, ‘Splinter’ Woodcock was solemnly warning one of his fellow members: ‘You are driving the last Rolls-Royce in Pharamaul.’
I do not know what will happen to Pharamaul after we have packed up. It seems likely that its future, like the life of man in the seventeenth century, will be nasty, brutish, and short.
That word is brutish, not (as you might suppose) British.
But if this is all we leave behind us, after 126 years – a sodden wake, a tear-stained Rolls-Royce, a forlorn show of cocked hats, and a Chief humiliated, sacked, and then reimported as Prime Minister – then why in God’s name were we ever there in the first place?
We were there in the first place, David Bracken thought irritably, as any bloody fool knew, because no one else wanted to take Pharamaul on, at a time when it was being reduced to chaos and ruin by tribal warfare. True, Britain had some minor trading interests there; and there had been a vague idea, when first the island came into the news, that if anyone was going to walk in it had better be the British rather than the Germans, who, once installed there, would be squarely astride the sea routes to the Cape.
But the Germans, like everyone else in the scramble for Africa, were there for loot rather than strategy; and this latter concept had only been someone’s stray tea-time thought on a Foreign Office memorandum, circa 1840. By and large, Britain had gone in to restore order, an abiding national passion long before and ever since.
David laid aside the three-day-old Secretariat copy of the Daily Thresh, and, his thoughts reaching for the past rather than the present, opened one of the lower drawers of his desk. From it he took out a dog-eared yellowing sheaf of papers bound with pink tape, blew the dust off the top sheet, and laid the pile in front of him. It was Andrew Macmillan’s ancient, never-to-be-finished History of Pharamaul.
When David Bracken had first come out to Pharamaul, Macmillan, the Resident Commissioner up at Gamate, had been his chief mentor and friend: a wise, cynical, set-in-his-ways colonial administrator near the end of a career dedicated without stint to this unrewarding corner of the world.
As a first briefing on the country, he had given David his manuscript to read, though almost shyly; and when he later died, in despair and defeat, brought down by the bloody violence which had made Dinamaula’s exile essential, David had promised himself to finish the book – because of all that the other man had done for him, and especially because of the way Andrew had died, beaten by Pharamaul.
But in fact he had never added a word to it, and sometimes he was ashamed of the fact. He was ashamed at this moment, as he looked down at the messy, forlorn stack of pages. Macmillan had been writing the book, or trying to write it, for the last fifteen years of his life; it was to be his testament, the best he could do, by way of judgement and witness, for the country which had shackled him. The crabbed writing of the first paragraph, which David knew nearly by heart, was thus more than twenty-seven years old:
The Principality of Pharamaul came into official existence on the fifteenth day of April, 1842, by Royal Decree. A company of Her Majesty’s Foot Guards having been brought in to quell an insurrection which threatened British trading interests, both at Port Victoria and in the interior, they stayed to ensure public order; and thereafter a Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Hugo Fortescue-Hambleton, was appointed (in the words of the proclamation) ‘to re-establish the rule of law, inculcate the principles of good administration, and work towards such degree of self-determination as the inhabitants’ best endeavours, and Her Majesty’s Government, may from time to time decide’. From that moment, Pharamaul was a British Protectorate under the Crown.
Well, they had kept their word, thought David, and now they had gone the first full step beyond it. Without Britain, Pharamaul would have been nothing; now at last it was something. It was on the map as a separate country, where before it had been two half-starved warring tribes, eternally at each other’s throats, fighting murderously for goats and sand.
The process had taken a long time, and cost the lives of many good men: generations of the younger sons of England, pitchforked into this barren waste and told to get on with it. Willing or not, content or rebellious, they had got on with it to good purpose.
To show for their labours and lives and deaths, Pharamaul had achieved some modest blessings which, in the light of the grim past, were more like modest miracles. Most of the tropical diseases had been conquered; enteric and hookworm no longer doomed men to lie down and die; the Medical Officer of Health had replaced the witch doctor, after a long, patient, and cunning battle; and cow dung was not now the specific ointment for raw wounds.
There was much more to eat. Water conservation had trebled the crops and multiplied the livestock; the huge wandering herds of goats, which had once been the sole measure of prestige in Maula life, and which could strip a hillside bare in a day’s grazing, had been culled to reasonable proportions. Though Tulbach Browne’s dig at ‘gaunt cattle’ was still fairly near the mark, the breeds had been improved; meat was now a staple food instead of a bizarre luxury, and the hides, exported from the abattoir at Port Victoria, made a profit and paid men’s wages. An entirely new crop, groundnuts, was being pressed for oil and cattle food.
Most Maulas still lived on the land, and clung to it, and believed in nothing else. But there were three thriving saw mills to support a logging industry; there was the big fish-canning plant up at Fish Village, now branching out into such exotic fare as tinned crayfish tails. The harbour had been deepened and improved; the repair dockyard could take ships up to 5,000 tons. Most exotic and incomprehensible of all, a satellite-tracking station had been set up on a hilltop on the west coast, and there strange mad men from England and even America watched the heavens and talked to each other all night.
Half the people could read and write. Half was not enough for a literate election, and the coming contest would still be fought under signs instead of names. Yet fifty per cent was better than most of Africa, and, with big new schools and big new hospitals to back them up, the children of Pharamaul were marching steadily towards their privilege, pushing the percentage up every day.
It was not dramatic, any of it; the ‘colonialist’ taunt was still heard from the sophisticates whenever Pharamaul was mentioned, as if the pace of Africa, traditional and stubborn for a thousand years, could be shoved through the sonic barrier just by wishing it so. Yet motives and methods had changed immeasurably over the years; Britain, having come to pacify and discipline, had remained to educate and develop; and she was now, in all good faith, handing over the result as a modest going concern.
Because of the size and structure of the country, there had been deep misgivings about it in London, and the pace had been set deliberately slow, so that Pharamaul could grow into freedom rather than swallow it whole at the touch of a wand. If it had to come, let it have a fair working chance … Bringing back Dinamaula from his exile had been the first step, and with that, David Bracken had been intimately concerned.
He could still remember making the flight back from London with Dinamaula, an exact reversal of the strange and awkward journey of five years earlier, when he had ‘conducted’ the exiled chief out of Pharamaul. Then, he had had a bitter young man on his hands, a young man who felt, in his own words, that he ‘had been treated like a little boy’, and hustled out of his homeland as the scapegoat for his country’s troubles.
On the return journey, they had both been wary of each other. So much depended on how this thing went; a careless word might estrange them, and a careless act might harvest a whole new crop of troubles. But they had got on well, as they usually did in private; in the five-year interval they had both grown up, more than enough to recognize that the past was the past, and that an old grudge, like an old suspicion, could with forbearance be buried for ever.
The flight had proved exhilarating for both of them; and the uproarious, triumphant welcome home had been Pharamaul’s confirmation that (as David Bracken had reported, times without number) the Maulas would have Dinamaula as their chief, and no other man.
It might have turned his head, or given him that touch of overconfidence which grew into rashness or arrogance. But it did not. Dinamaula had settled down to work with sober determination. There were no backward glances towards London, where he had once been lionized, and where a cheaper popularity was always waiting for him.
He had come home to stay; his heart and mind and both his feet were in Pharamaul, and nowhere else. Very soon after he arrived, he had married a Maula girl from Gamate, as if embracing with her, once and for all, his own country and people.
David’s job had been to watch him, and to report on the prospects for the future. Going well beyond this, he had thrown all his weight on the side of independence for Pharamaul, with Dinamaula as the only possible choice for Prime Minister.
Official misgivings had not lessened with the years. There had been many discouraging talks with David’s old chief, Sir Hubert Godbold, head of the Scheduled Territories Office, which still held Pharamaul’s future within its cautious hand. Godbold, a wise and liberal civil servant who had watched, and in his time initiated, some mighty changes in Britain’s colonial holding, could not bring himself to be hopeful about the future.
‘I still don’t like it,’ he had said on one occasion, when they were sitting in his room, long after office hours, going over the prospects for the hundredth time. The view outside was a world away from Pharamaul; in place of the crystal-clear air and the harsh sunlight, there was only Whitehall on a Friday evening – gloomy, wet, tired out, beset by the rumble and roar of home-going traffic. ‘I agree with you that the pressures on us to make a move are tremendous – this is the way the world is going, and we’d be damned fools to try to stop it. Particularly in Africa. But Pharamaul! How on earth can they ever make a go of it?’
‘I think they have a good chance,’ answered David. He cared enough about this to be unusually stubborn, in a way he would never have dreamed of, a few years earlier; and nothing made him more stubborn than to be thousands of miles away from Pharamaul, fighting its battles on what now felt like alien ground.
He missed his adopted country all the time; even after a short week’s leave, London seemed artificial, and unconcerned, and damnably overcrowded. Wherever he went he felt like the classic colonial visitor, standing in odd clothes at the corner of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, homeless and bored and lonely. He wanted to be back at work; back in Pharamaul, the only place which was real … ‘Of course it will need help,’ he went on. ‘But it really has a better chance than lots of other places. It’s more – more compact, more manageable.’
‘It is also a great deal smaller,’ said Godbold. ‘Pharamaul will need at least two million pounds a year for the next ten years – not as a loan, either, but a direct grant. That is dependence, not independence.’
‘It’s costing us something like that already.’
‘Maybe it is. But at present we know exactly where the money goes, and we can control it.’
‘We could still control it, in a way.’
‘How?’
‘By refusing it, if we think it’s being wasted.’
Godbold smiled bleakly. ‘And be branded as hard-hearted and ungenerous tyrants? My dear David, I can see the banners now. “Britain Deserts Pharamaul.” “Down with Colonial Dictatorship.” “No Strings.” We’ve been through all that before, I think.’
‘But sir, it needn’t happen like that. We may have nothing to complain of at all, as far as spending is concerned. And if everything goes the way we hope, Pharamaul will start to make its own money.’
‘Out of fish and scrub cattle?’
‘That would have to be the basis. But of course we’d start thinking about secondary industries.’
‘Plastic knobkerries, I suppose.’ Godbold really was in a bad mood tonight. ‘Well, we’ll see, we’ll see. At the moment, I’m afraid, you must count me among the opposition.’
David was stung to indiscretion. ‘Sir, if that’s so, we’ll never get it.’
‘Who is “we”?’
‘I mean, Pharamaul.’
Godbold was looking at him sharply. He seemed to be on the verge of a rebuke, since David’s remark had switched the whole topic into a kind of personal framework, with more than a hint that Godbold had an unfair advantage which he would not scruple to use. That was the way people earned their permanent black marks, and ended up in the low, low reaches of the Archives Department … Godbold was tapping impatiently on his desk with a silver paperknife shaped like a cutlass, looking quite ready to use it against such sulky mutineers as this. Then suddenly he relaxed, and laid the ominous weapon aside, and asked: ‘If it went through, would you be prepared to stay on in Pharamaul?’
‘Oh yes.’ There could never be any doubt about that.
‘Well, in spite of what I’ve said, I would envy you.’
It was clear that Godbold meant it, though he did not look at all like a man willing to serve again in a new and chancy country. He only had a year to go before his retirement, and his face was now grey and weary. The years of service had taken their toll; and all he would have to show for them, after four decades at the centre of affairs, would be a brilliant, untarnished reputation within the narrowest of circles, one or two modest directorships, a decoration round his collar on state occasions, and a pension of one-half – or, as the Civil Service Commissioners preferred to phrase it, forty-eightieths – of his final salary of £6,500 a year.
As between Britain and Sir Hubert Godbold, KCMG, there could be no doubt who had had the best of the bargain.
‘Well, let us drink to the future, whatever it is,’ he said, and rose from his chair. Godbold kept a modest bar in his room, and did not care who knew it; if there were those who thought that the Permanent Under-Secretary for the Scheduled Territories should not have a drink whenever he felt like it, then that was just too bad … ‘Sherry or gin? Or whisky?’
‘Gin, please. Gin and tonic.’
‘That we can do.’ Godbold busied himself with glasses. Over his shoulder he said: ‘How’s the leave going?’
‘All right, sir. I’d rather be back.’
Godbold laughed. ‘That’s what Andrew always used to say. He thought London was a perfectly terrible place, compared with Pharamaul.’
‘I know just how he felt.’
That had been three years earlier. David Bracken had returned to Pharamaul empty-handed and depressed, to report to Dinamaula, among other people, that things were still ‘very sticky’. But then the gears moved again, and the car of state with them. Suddenly the whole subject of Pharamaul’s independence was stamped ‘Approved in principle’; and though the weasel words could mask a decade of niggling argument, at least the basic signal had been given. After that, it was a matter of hard facts, hard bargaining, and hard work.
A new constitution was hammered out, after consultation at every level, from the Council of Chiefs in Pharamaul to the Law Officers of the Crown in darkest Strand, WC2. Since all this had happened before, from British Guiana to Zanzibar, there were plenty of constitutions to choose from; the one selected, David thought irreverently at the time, was probably marked ‘Small & Slender’ – an 850-cc constitution, tropic-tested, with modest acceleration and really good brakes.
Once it was settled, there followed an inevitable procession of events, labels, and targets, sounding as dull and dusty as legal parchment, but disposing, as legal parchment did, of the flesh and blood of living, hopeful, and yearning men.
Entrenched clauses to safeguard the future. Setting up a Legislature (twelve appointed members, twelve elected). All new District Commissioners to be Maulas. Full-scale elections to be held within six months of independence (one man, one vote, all twenty-four members to be elected by ballot). No upper house. Defence and foreign affairs to remain in British hands. A Governor-General to represent the Queen, acknowledged as Head of State. ‘Reserved powers’ for the Crown in case of armed insurrection or public violence. Police, civil service, and judiciary to be ‘Maularized’ at a suitable pace, starting now.
This technical bread-and-butter, in such large quantities, had been barely digestible within the time allotted. Before long, independence, which had seemed such a slow process, had come to look, to David Bracken, more like a rush job. However hard he had worked, and however swift had been Dinamaula’s cooperation, the loose ends seemed to multiply, like a fraying rope which would not come under control. The longest and loosest end of all had still to be dealt with, as independence dawned. It was the coming election.
This was going to be difficult enough anyway. The vastmajority of adult Maulas and U-Maulas, totally unsophisticated, would have no idea what it was all about. They could not read. They had a hereditary chief already. What was this election? Was it to bring his rule into question, as had happened before? Or was it a cunning way of increasing taxes?
For David Bracken it seemed to hold the seeds of every kind of headache. The direst of all was the idea of an ‘official opposition’, with official blessing. To the average citizen of Pharamaul, opposition meant seizing a spear and quenching it in an enemy, preferably between his shoulder blades. A man either fought, or he was at peace. Yet now they were being invited, by implication, to pick such a quarrel artificially; to choose, if they wished, a man who would go down to Port Victoria and defy their chief. If this was what the Old Queen wished, was she then against Dinamaula? What was a man to think?
The only true basis for an opposition party would be a division on tribal lines, the old North and South split which had once brought the country to ruin, and was the very last thing to be revived.
As one looked at other, torn parts of Africa, David thought, it was doubtful whether the polite and stately rules of the Mother of Parliaments were really suitable for export. It might be that, with the noblest of motives, they were inviting Pharamaul to go the same way.
Dinamaula had once taken him aback, when they were talking about the future Legislature, by remarking: ‘Well, we have plenty of candidates for Black Rod!’ Dinamaula was so rarely ribald that this slur upon a noble office had a double edge. If the Prime Minister himself couldn’t take Black Rod seriously …
The phone on his desk rang, and it was the man he had been thinking about. But the Prime Minister’s first words were something of a shock. The slow, heavy voice inquired: ‘Can I speak to the official hatchet boy?’
‘What’s that?’ asked David, taken by surprise.
There was a laugh from the other end of the line. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t read your Daily Thresh?’
‘Oh, that.’ David suddenly remembered, with a slight embarrassment. ‘Tulbach Browne …’
‘He was in splendid form, didn’t you think?’
‘I’d like to wring his neck,’ said David. Then he remembered the courtesies. ‘Good morning, Prime Minister. I’m glad you’re not too annoyed about the article, anyway.’
‘I was ready for it,’ said Dinamaula, ‘and so were you. Now, presumably, he’ll leave us alone for a bit. God knows we’ve got enough to do, without any barracking from the spectators.’
‘He won’t come back till something goes wrong. So he won’t come back.’
‘What a pleasant thought … There are one or two things I want to talk about. Nothing special. Are you busy at the moment?’
‘Well, I have some of the Chamber of Trade people coming to see me. But–’
‘No, don’t change anything. Let’s have lunch instead.’
‘I’d like that,’ answered David. ‘Shall I meet you at the club?’
‘That should make Mr Splinter Woodcock very happy,’ said Dinamaula, on a sudden grating note. ‘Black members!’
So he had been made angry, after all. David put as much force as he could into his answer: ‘I’ve a damned good mind to have Woodcock up before the committee!’
‘What for?’
‘Discussing club affairs with a non-member. It’s absolutely unheard-of! It’s against all the form.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ said Dinamaula, ‘that Tulbach Browne was a member. Just for that day. So technically …’ he paused, and then his voice changed. ‘Oh hell, what does it matter, anyway? Black skins are thick as well. Any scientist will tell you. I’ll see you later, David.’
‘One o’clock?’
‘One o’clock.’ Dinamaula’s voice changed again, to a very fair imitation of the Earl of Urle’s daemonic tones. ‘Let us march forward together towards a happy and prosperous lunch.’